I've actually got the Android SDK on this system via an install of Android Studio, but obviously this script couldn't find it. Since I'm focused on iOS first, it's not an issue here.

The next steps involve creating the XCode/Android projects from my existing Chrome Packaged App. I followed the directions from here.

Creating the iOS/Android projects currently creates a copy of the Chrome app's files, so that from henceforth you would need to keep things synchronized manually. This is not really a long-term workflow option, but they (obviously) "plan to support symlinks eventually". You've got a similar challenge when developing for multiple mobile operating systems with Cordova/PhoneGap, anyway. Andrew Trice has a post last year describing one solution to that for PhoneGap, and there may be improvements since then, too. In this case, there may be some caution at play here as well, given the relative newness of the chrome-app-to-phonegap project.

Creating the projects requires running the file mca, which is in the mobile-chrome-apps directory, and so you need to make sure this is in your path. Note that they suggest not to install the new app in the mobile-chrome-apps directory.

mca create com.companyname.YourApp --source=path/to/ChromeApp

When I first ran the mca command, it hit an error because my app has a slash "\" in its name. This showed up as the mca command was trying to copy the XCode project "__TESTING__" to a filename based on the "name" property it found in my Chrome app's manifest.json file. I opened the "__TESTING__" project directly in XCode anyway to see what happened. It built and ran, but I had not noticed the documented gotcha highlighted below, so I assumed I'd rename the app and try the mca again.

In XCode, make sure you are building the right target, otherwise you will just see a default Cordova page and not your app.

In the top left (beside Run&Stop buttons) there is a dropdown to select target project and device. Ensure that YourApp is selected and not CordovaLib.

I then changed the "name" property in the manifest.json file and tried again and it worked right away in the iOS simulator. And once again, I am impressed with the snappiness of the iOS simulator. Too bad the actual devices aren't as fast.

And there ya go - a Chrome packaged app running on the iPad/iPhone simulator, implemented in a fairly painless fashion.

The purpose of this page is to summarize in one place some of the interactive visualizations I have worked on. Most of these were built...

"When you start on your journey to Ithaca, then pray that the road is long, full of adventure, full of knowledge... Always keep Ithaca fixed in your mind. To arrive there is your ultimate goal. But do not hurry the voyage at all." (from "Ithaca", by C. P. Cavafy)